The noble Lord has been generous enough to say that he does not in any way question the integrity or approach of my noble friend or me. I do the same for him. I very much appreciate and endorse what he said. In the fast-moving world that we are talking about, these are proper concerns. The whole issue of who would operate the identity cards to which he and his Administration were committed raised precisely those questions, too. I think he would now accept that.
All we are saying here—I look forward to what the noble Baroness will say—is that, having already committed to the use of the DWP data, it is only reasonable to examine other databases that may be balanced in a different way demographically and politically. Maybe the terms in which our amendment is written need to be more carefully considered. That is fine; it is what a Committee stage in your Lordships’ House is all about. I entirely understand the concerns that the noble Lord expressed but we have to be very careful. If we went right down the road of being risk-averse on these
issues, we would do no data matching or mining at all and the register would become even more inadequate than it is already. That is a very serious proposition.
I do not know if the noble Lord was in the House earlier, but we had to identify that the status quo now is totally unacceptable. We have dropped back to the low 80s in terms of the completeness of the register. We are not where we were 10 years ago. I think it is agreed on all sides of the House that we have to look at every possible way to improve the integrity of the register both in completeness and accuracy. That is the purpose of our amendments.